Chapter IV: Part 4

We took the round they gave us along the base of the high hills, we got our papers signed at the different stables, we noted the hoofs of the horses and their numbers; a good woman at a large farm gave us food of eggs and onions, and at noon we turned to get back to quarters for the grooming. Everything then was very well--to have ridden out alone without the second horse and with no horrible great pole to crush one's leg, and be free--though we missed it--of the clank of the guns. We felt like gentlemen at ease, and were speaking grandly to each other, when I heard Garnon say to the senior of us a word that made things seem better still, for he pointed out to a long blue line beyond Domremy and overhanging the house of Joan of Arc, saying that the town lay there. "What town?" said I to my Ancient; and my Ancient, instead of answering simply, took five minutes to explain to me how a recruit could not know that the round of the reserve horses came next before camp, and that this town away on the western ridge was the first halting-place upon the road. Then my mind filled with distances, and I was overjoyed, saving for this one thing, that I had but two francs and a few coppers left, and that I was not in reach of more.

When we had ridden in, saluted, and reported at the guard, we saw the guns drawn up in line at the end of the yard, and we went into grooming and ate and slept, hardly waiting for the morning and the long regimental call before the réveillé; the notes that always mean the high road for an army, and that are as old as Fontenoy.

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That next morning they woke us all before dawn--long before dawn. The sky was still keen, and there was not even a promise of morning in the air, nor the least faintness in the eastern stars. They twinkled right on the edges of the world over the far woods of Lorraine, beyond the hollow wherein lay the town; it was even cold like winter as we harnessed; and I remember the night air catching me in the face as I staggered from the harness-room, with my campaign saddle and the traces and the girths and the saddle cloth, and all the great weight that I had to put upon my horses.

We stood in the long stables all together, very hurriedly saddling and bridling and knotting up the traces behind. A few lanterns gave us an imperfect light. We hurried because it was a pride to be the first battery, and in the French service, rightly or wrongly, everything in the artillery is made for speed, and to speed everything is sacrificed. So we made ready in the stable and brought our horses out in order before the guns in the open square of quarters. The high plateau on which the barracks stood was touched with a last late frost, and the horses coming out of the warm stables bore the change ill, lifting their heads and stamping. A man could not leave the leaders for a moment, and, while the chains were hooked on, even my middle horses were restive and had to be held. My hands stiffened at the reins, and I tried to soothe both my beasts, as the lantern went up and down wherever the work was being done. They quieted when the light was taken round behind by the tumbrils, where two men were tying on the great sack of oats exactly as though we were going on campaign.

These two horses of mine were called Pacte and Basilique. Basilique was saddled; a slow beast, full of strength and sympathy, but stupid and given to sudden fears. Pacte was the led horse, and had never heard guns. It was prophesied that when first I should have to hold him in camp when we were practising he would break everything near him, and either kill me or get me cells. But I did not believe these prophecies, having found my Ancient and all third-year men too often to be liars, fond of frightening the younger recruits. Meanwhile Pacte stood in the sharp night, impatient, and shook his harness. Everything had been quickly ordered.

We filed out of quarters, passed the lamp of the guard, and saw huddled there the dozen or so that were left behind while we were off to better things. Then a drawn-out cry at the head of the column was caught up all along its length, and we trotted; the metal of shoes and wheel-rims rang upon the road, and I felt as a man feels on a ship when it leaves harbour for great discoveries.

We had climbed the steep bank above St. Martin, and were on the highest ridge of land dominating the plain, when the sky first felt the approach of the sun. Our backs were to the east, but the horizon before us caught a reflection of the dawn; the woods lost their mystery, and one found oneself marching in a partly cultivated open space with a forest all around. The road ran straight for miles like an arrow, and stretched swarmingly along it was the interminable line of guns. But with the full daylight, and after the sun had risen in a mist, they deployed us out of column into a wide front on a great heath in the forest, and we halted. There we brewed coffee, not by batteries, but gun by gun.

Warmed by this little meal, mere coffee without sugar or milk, but with a hunk left over from yesterday's bread and drawn stale from one's haversack (the armies of the Republic and of Napoleon often fought all day upon such sustenance, and even now, as you will see, the French do not really eat till a march is over--and this may be a great advantage in warfare)--warmed, I say, by this little meal, and very much refreshed by the sun and the increasing merriment of morning, we heard the first trumpet-call and then the shouted order to mount.

We did not form one column again. We went off at intervals, by batteries; and the reason of this was soon clear, for on getting to a place where four roads met, some took one and some took another, the object being to split up the unwieldy train of thirty-six guns, with all their waggons and forges, into a number of smaller groups, marching by ways more or less parallel towards the same goal; and my battery was left separate, and went at last along a lane that ran through pasture land in a valley.

The villages were already awake, and the mist was all but lifted from the meadows when we heard men singing in chorus in front of us some way off. These were the gunners that had left long before us and had gone on forward afoot. For in the French artillery it is a maxim (for all I know, common to all others--if other artilleries are wise) that you should weight your limber (and therefore your horses) with useful things alone; and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not carried, save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is desired. I do, indeed, remember one case when it was thought necessary to send a group of batteries during the manoeuvres right over from the left to the right of a very long position which our division was occupying on the crest of the Argonne. There was the greatest need for haste, and we packed the gunners on to the limber (there were no seats on the gun in the old type--there are now) and galloped all the way down the road, and put the guns in action with the horses still panting and exhausted by that extra weight carried at such a speed and for such a distance. But on the march, I say again, we send the gunners forward, and not only the gunners, but as you shall hear when we come to Commercy, a reserve of drivers also. We send them forward an hour or two before the guns start; we catch them up with the guns on the road; they file up to let us pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality and ceremony. Then they come into the town of the halt an hour or two after we have reached it.

So here in this silent and delightful valley, through which ran a river, which may have been the Meuse or may have been a tributary only, we caught up our gunners. Their song ceased, they were lined up along the road, and not till we were passed were they given a little halt and repose. But when we had gone past with a huge clattering and dust, the bombardier of my piece, who was a very kindly man, a young farmer, and who happened to be riding abreast of my horses, pointed them out to me behind us at a turning in the road. They were taking that five minutes' rest which the French have borrowed from the Germans, and which comes at the end of every hour on the march. They had thrown down their knapsacks and were lying flat taking their ease, I could not long look backwards, but a very little time after, when we had already gained nearly half a mile upon them, we again heard the noise of their singing, and knew that they had reshouldered their heavy packs. And this pack is the same in every unmounted branch of the service, and is the heaviest thing, I believe, that has been carried by infantry since the Romans.

It was not yet noon, and extremely hot for the time of year and for the coldness of the preceding night, when they halted us at a place where the road bent round in a curve and went down a little hollow. There we dismounted and cleaned things up a little before getting into the town, where we were to find what the French call an _étape_; that is, the town at which one halts at the end of one's march, and the word is also used for the length of a march itself. It is not in general orders to clean up in this way before coming in, and there were some commanders who were never more pleased than when they could bring their battery into town covered with dust and the horses steaming and the men haggard, for this they thought to be evidence of a workmanlike spirit. But our colonel had given very contrary orders, to the annoyance of our captain, a man risen from the ranks who loved the guns and hated finery.

Then we went at a walk, the two trumpets of the battery sounding the call which is known among French gunners as "the eighty hunters," because the words to it are, "_quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, quatre-vingt, chasseurs_," which words, by their metallic noise and monotony, exactly express the long call that announces the approach of guns. We went right through the town, the name of which is Commercy, and the boys looked at us with pride, not knowing how hateful they would find the service when once they were in for its grind and hopelessness. But then, for that matter, I did not know myself with what great pleasure I should look back upon it ten years after. Moreover, nobody knows beforehand whether he will like a thing or not; and there is the end of it.

We formed a park in the principal place of the town; there were appointed two sentinels to do duty until the arrival of the gunners who should relieve them and mount a proper guard, and then we were marched off to be shown our various quarters. For before a French regiment arrives at a town others have ridden forward and have marked in chalk upon the doors how many men and how many horses are to be quartered here or there, and my quarters were in a great barn with a very high roof; but my Ancient, upon whom I depended for advice, was quartered in a house, and I was therefore lonely.

We groomed our horses, ate our great midday meal, and were free for a couple of hours to wander about the place. It is a garrison, and, at that time, it was full of cavalry, with whom we fraternised; but the experiment was a trifle dangerous, for there is always a risk of a quarrel when regiments meet as there is with two dogs, or two of any other kind of lively things.

Then came the evening, and very early, before it was dark, I was asleep in my clothes in some straw, very warm; but I was so lazy that I had not even taken off my belt or sword. And that was the end of the first day's marching.

THE SEA-WALL OF THE WASH

The town of Wisbeach is very like the town of Boston. It stands upon a river which is very narrow and which curves, and in which there rises and falls a most considerable tide, and which is bounded by slimy wooden sides. Here, as at Boston, the boats cannot turn round; if they come in frontways they have to go out backwards, like Mevagissey bees: an awkward harbour.

As I sat there in the White Hart, waiting for steak and onions, I read in a book descriptive of the place that a whale had come to Wisbeach once, and I considered that a whale coming up to Wisbeach on a tide would certainly stay there; not indeed for the delights of the town (of which I say nothing), but because there would be no room to turn round; and a whale cannot swim backwards. The only fish that can swim backwards is an eel. This I have proved by observation, and I challenge any fisherman to deny it.

So much for Wisbeach, which stands upon the River Nene or Nen, which is the last of the towns defended by the old sea-wall--which is the third of the Fen ports--the other two being Boston and Lynn, which is served by two lines of railway and which has two stations.

Very early next morning, and by one of these stations, another man and I took train to a bridge called Sutton Bridge, where one can cross the River Nen, and where (according to the map) one can see both the sea-walls, the old and the new. It was my plan to walk along the shore of the Wash right across the flats to Lynn, and so at last perhaps comprehend the nature of this curious land.

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When I got to Sutton Bridge I discovered it to be a monstrous thing of iron standing poised upon a huge pivot in mid-stream. It bore the railway and the road together. It was that kind of triumphant engineering which once you saw only in England, but which now you will see all over the world. It was designed to swing open on its central pivot to let boats go up the River Nen, and then to come back exactly to its place with a clang; but when we got to it we found it neither one thing nor the other. It was twisted just so much that the two parts of the roads (the road on the bridge and the road on land) did not join.

Was a boat about to pass? No. Why was it open thus? A man was cleaning it. The bridge is not as big as the Tower Bridge, but it is very big, and the man was cleaning it with a little rag. He was cleaning the under part, the mechanisms and contraptions that can only be got at when the bridge is thus ajar. He cleaned without haste and without exertion, and as I watched him I considered the mightiness of the works of Man contrasted with His Puny Frame. I also asked him when I should pass, but he answered nothing.

As we thus waited men gathered upon either side--men of all characters and kinds, men holding bicycles, men in carts, afoot, on horseback, vigorous men and feeble, old men, women also and little children, and youths witless of life, and innocent young girls; they gathered and increased, they became as numerous as leaves, they stretched out their hands in a desire for the further shore: but the river ran between.

Then, as being next the gate, I again called out: When might we pass? A Fenland man who was on duty there doing nothing said, I could pass when the bridge was shut again. I said: When would that be? He said: Could I not see that the man was cleaning the bridge? I said that, contrasting the bridge with him and his little rag, he might go on from now to the Disestablishment of the English Church before he had done; but as for me, I desired to cross, and so did all that multitude.

Without grace they shut the bridge for us, the gate opened of itself, and in a great clamorous flood, like an army released from a siege, we poured over, all of us, rejoicing into Wringland; for so is called this flat, reclaimed land, which stands isolated between the Nen and the Ouse.

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Was I not right in saying when I wrote about Ely that the corner of a corner of England is infinite, and can never be exhausted?

Along the cut which takes the Nen out to sea, then across some level fields, and jumping a ditch or two, one gets to the straight, steep, and high dyke which protects the dry land and cuts off the plough from the sea marshes. When I had climbed it and looked out over endless flats to the sails under the brune of the horizon I understood the Fens.

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Nowhere that I have been to in the world does the land fade into the sea so inconspicuously.

The coasts of western England are like the death of a western man in battle--violent and heroic. The land dares all, and plunges into a noisy sea. This coast of Eastern England is like the death of one of these eastern merchants here--lethargic, ill-contented, drugged with ease. The dry land slips, and wallows into a quiet, very shallow water, confused with a yellow thickness and brackish with the weight of inland water behind.

I have heard of the great lakes, especially of the marshes at the mouth of the Volga, in the Caspian, where the two elements are for miles indistinguishable, and where no one can speak of a shore; but here the thing is more marvellous, because it is the true sea. You have, I say, the true sea, with great tides, and bearing ships, and seaports to which the ships can go; and on the other side you have, inhabited, an ancient land. There should be a demarcation between them, a tide mark or limit. There is nothing. You cannot say where one begins and the other ends. One does not understand the Fens until one has seen that shore.

The sand and the mud commingle. The mud takes on little tufts of salt grass barely growing under the harsh wind. The marsh is cut and wasted into little islands covered at every high tide, except, perhaps, the extreme of the neaps. Down on that level, out from the dyke to the uncertain line of the water, you cannot walk a hundred yards without having to cross a channel more or less deep, a channel which the working of the muddy tides has scoured up into the silt and ooze of the sodden land. These channels are yards deep in slime, and they ramify like the twisted shoots of an old vine. Were you to make a map of them as they engrave this desolate waste it would look like the fine tortuous cracks that show upon antique enamel, or the wandering of threads blown at random on a woman's work-table by the wind.

There are miles and miles of it right up to the EMBANKMENT, the great and old SEA-WALL, which protects the houses of men. You have but to eliminate that embankment to imagine what the whole countryside must have been like before it was raised, and the meaning of the Fens becomes clear to you. The Fens were long ago but the continuation inland of this sea-morass. The tide channels of the marsh were all of one kind, though they differed so much in size. Some of these channels were small without name; some a little larger, and these had a local name; others were a little larger again, and worthy to be called rivers--the Ouse, the Nen, the Welland, the Glen, the Witham. But, large or small, they were nothing, all of them, but the scouring of tide-channels in the light and sodden slime. It was the high tide that drowned all this land, the low tide that drained it; and wherever a patch could be found just above the influence of the tide or near enough to some main channel for the rush and swirl of the water to drain the island, there the villages grew. Wherever such a patch could be found men built their first homes. Sometimes, before men civic, came the holy hermits. But man, religious, or greedy, or just wandering, crept in after each inundation and began to tame the water and spread out even here his slow, interminable conquest. So Wisbeach, so March, so Boston grew, and so--the oldest of them all--the Isle of Ely.

The nature of the country (a nature at which I had but guessed whenever before this I had wandered through it, and which I had puzzled at as I viewed its mere history) was quite clear, now that I stood upon the wall that fenced it in from the salt water. It was easy to see not only what judgments had been mistaken, but also in what way they had erred. One could see why and how the homelessness of the place had been exaggerated. One could see how the level was just above (not, as in Holland, below) the mean of the tides. One could discover the manner in which communication from the open sea was possible. The deeps lead out through the sand; they are but continuations under water of that tide-scouring which is the note of all the place inland, and out, far out, we could see the continuation of the river-beds, and at their mouths far into the sea, the sails.

A man sounding as he went before the north-east wind was led by force into the main channels. He was "shepherded" into Lynn River or Wisbeach River or Boston River, according as he found the water shoaler to one side or other of his boat. So must have come the first Saxon pirates from the mainland: so (hundreds of years later) came here our portion of that swarm of Pagans, which all but destroyed Europe; so centuries before either of them, in a time of which there is no record, the ignorant seafaring men from the east and the north must have come right up into our island, as the sea itself creeps right up into the land through these curious crevices and draughts in the Fenland wall.

Men--at least the men of our race--have made everything for themselves; and they will never cease. They continue to extend and possess. It is not only the architecture; it is the very landscape of Europe which has been made by Europeans. In what way did we begin to form this difficult place, which is neither earth nor water, and in which we might have despaired? It was conquered by human artifice, of course, somewhat as Frisia and the Netherlands, and, as we may believe, the great bay of the Cotentin were conquered; but it has certain special characters of its own, and these again are due to the value in this place of the tides, and to the absence of those natural dykes of sand which were, a thousand years ago, the beginnings of Holland.

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Two methods, working side by side, have from the beginning of human habitation reclaimed the Fens. The first has been the canalisation, the fencing in of the tideways; the second has been the banking out of the general sea. The spring tides covered much of this land, and when they retired left it drowned. Against their universal advancing sheet of water a bank could be made. Such a bank cut off the invasion of the hundreds of runnels, small and great, by which the more ordinary tides that could not cover the surface had yet crept into the soil and soaked it through.

When such a bank had been built, gates, as it were, permitted the water to spend its force and also to use its ebb and flow for the draining of the land beyond. The gates which let the tide pour up and down the main ways became the new mouths of the main rivers; inland the courses of the rivers (which now took all the sea and thus became prodigious) were carefully guarded. Even before trenches were dug to drain the fields around, earth was thrown up on either side of the rivers to confine them each to one permanent channel; nor did the level of the rivers rise, or their beds gets clogged; the strength of the tide sufficed for the deepening of their channels. Into the rivers so fortified the other waterways of the Fens were conducted.

By these methods alone much of the land was rendered habitable and subject to the plough. Probably these methods were enough to make it all it was in the Middle Ages. It was only far later, almost in our own time, that water was gathered by trenches in the lowland beneath the rivers and pumped out artificially with mills; nor is it quite certain even now that this method (borrowed from Holland) is the best; for the land, as I have said, is above and not below the sea.

Of these words, whose tradition is immemorial, the greatest, of course, are the sea-walls.

Perhaps the river-walls came first, but the great bank which limited and protected the land against the sea is also older than any history.

It is called Roman, and relics of Rome have been found in it, but it has not the characteristic of Roman work. It runs upon no regular lines; its contour is curved and variable. It is surely far older than the Roman occupation. Earth, heaped and beaten hard, is the most enduring of things; the tumuli all over England have outlasted even the monoliths, and the great defensive mounds at Norwich and at Oxford are stronger and clearer cut than anything that the Middle Ages have left. This bank, which first made Fenland, still stands most conspicuous. You may follow it from the Nene above Sutton Bridge right over to Lynn River, and again northward from Sutton Bridge (or rather, from the ferry above it) right round _outside_ Long Sutton and Holbeach, and by Forsdyke Bridge and _outside_ Swyneshead; everywhere it encloses and protects the old parishes, and everywhere seaward of it the names of the fields mark the newest of endeavours.

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We returned from a long wandering upon the desolate edges of the sea to the bank which we proposed to follow right round to the mouth of the Ouse: a bank that runs not straight, but in great broken lines, as in old-fashioned fortification, and from which far off upon the right one sees the famous churches of the Wringland, far off upon the left a hint beyond the marshes and the sands of the very distant open sea.

A gale had risen with the morning, and while it invigorated the travellers in these wastes it seemed to increase their loneliness, for it broke upon nothing, and it removed the interest of the eye from the monotonous sad land to the charge and change of the torn sky above, but in a sense also it impelled us, as though we were sailing before it as it swept along the edge of the bank and helped us to forget the interminable hours.

The birds for whom this estuary is a kind of sanctuary and a place of secure food in all weathers, the birds swept out in great flocks over the flats towards the sea. They were the only companionship afforded to us upon this long day, and they had, or I fancied they had, in their demeanour a kind of contempt for the rare human beings they might see, as though knowing how little man could do upon those sands. They fed all together upon the edge of the water, upon the edge of the falling tide, very far off, making long bands of white that mixed with the tiny breaking wavelets. Now and then they rose in bodies, and so rising disappeared; but as they would turn and wheel against the wind, seeking some other ground, they sent from moment to moment flashes of delicate and rare light from the great multitude of their wings. I know of nothing to which one may compare these glimpses of evanescent shining but these two things--the flash of a sword edge and the rapid turning in human hands of a diaphanous veil held in the light. It shone or glinted for a moment, then they would all wheel together and it disappeared.

So, watching them as a kind of marvel, we saw distant across the sea a faint blue tower, and recognised it for Boston Stump, so many, many miles away.

But for the birds and this landmark, which never left us, all the length of the dyke was empty of any sight save the mixing of the sea and the land. Then gradually the heights in Norfolk beyond grew clearer, a further shore narrowed the expanse of waters, and we came to the river mouth of the Ouse, and caught sight, up the stream, of the houses of a town.

THE CERDAGNE

There is a part of Europe of which for the moment most people have not heard, but which in a few years everybody will know; so it is well worth telling before it is changed what it is like to-day. It is called the Cerdagne. It is a very broad valley, stretching out between hills whose height is so incredible--or at least, whose appearance of height is so incredible--that when they are properly painted no one will believe them to be true. Indeed, I know a man who painted them just as they are, and those who saw the picture said it was fantastic and out of Nature, like Turner's drawings. But those who had been with him and had seen the place, said that somehow he had just missed the effect of height.

It is remarkable that in any country, even if one does not know that country well, what is unusual to the country strikes the traveller at once. And so it is with the Cerdagne. For all the valleys of the Pyrenees except this one are built upon the same plan. They are deep gorges, narrowing in two places to gates or profound corridors, one of these places being near the crest and one near the plain; and down these valleys fall violent torrents, and in them there is only room for tiny villages or very little towns, squeezed in between the sheer surfaces of the rock or the steep forests.

So it is with the Valley of Laruns, and with that of Meuléon, and with that of Luz, and with those of the two Bagnères, and with the Val d'Aran, and with the Val d'Esera, and with the very famous Valley of Andorra.

With valleys so made the mountains are indeed more awful than they might be in the Alps: but you never see them standing out and apart, and the mastering elevation of the Pyrenees is not apprehended until you come to the cirque or hollow at the end of each valley just underneath the main ridge; by that time you have climbed so far that you have halved the height of the barrier.

But the Cerdagne, unlike all the other valleys, is as broad as half a county, and is full of towns and fields and men and mules and slow rivulets and corn; so, standing upon either side and looking to the other, you see all together and in the large its mountain boundaries. It is like the sight of the Grampians from beyond Strathmore, but very much more grand. Moreover, as no one has written sufficiently about it to prepare the traveller for what he is to see (and in attempting to do so here I am probably doing wrong, but a man must write down what he has seen), the Cerdagne breaks upon him quite unexpectedly, and his descent into that wealthy plain is the entry into a new world. He may have learnt the mountains by heart, as we had, in many stumbling marches and many nights slept out beneath the trees, and many crossings of the main chain by those precipitous cols which make the ridge of the Pyrenees more like a paling than a mountain crest, but though he should know them thoroughly all the way from the Atlantic for two hundred miles, the Cerdagne will only appear to him the more astonishing. It renews in any man however familiar he may be with great mountains, the impressions of that day when he first saw the distant summits and thought them to be clouds.

Apart from all this, the Cerdagne is full of a lively interest, because it preserves far better than any other Pyrenean valley those two Pyrenean things--the memory of European history and the intense local spirit of the Vals.

The memory of European history is to be seen in the odd tricks which the frontier plays. It was laid down by the commissioners of Mazarin two hundred and fifty years ago, and instead of following the watershed (which would leave the Cerdagne all Spanish politically as it is Catalan by language and position) it crosses the valley from one side to another, leaving the top end of it and the sources of its rivers under French control.

That endless debate as to whether race or government will most affect a people can here be tested, though hardly decided. The villages are Spanish, the hour of meals is Spanish, and the wine is Spanish wine. But the clocks keep time, and the streets are swept, and, oddest of all, the cooking is French cooking. The people are Spanish in that they are slow to serve you or to find you a mount or to show you the way, but they are French in that they are punctual in the hour at which they have promised to do these things; and they are Spanish in the shapes of their ricks and the nature of their implements, but French in the aspect of their fields. One might also discuss--it would be most profitable of all--where they are Spanish and where they are French in their observance of religion.

This freak which the frontier plays in cutting so united a countryside into two by an imaginary line is further emphasised by an island of Spanish territory which has been left stranded, as it were, in the midst of the valley. It is called Llivia, and is about as large as a large English country parish, with a small country town in the middle.

One comes across the fields from villages where the signs and villagers and the very look of the surface of the road are French; one suddenly notices Spanish soldiers, Spanish signs, and Spanish prices in the streets of the little place; one leaves it, and in five minutes one is in France again. It is connected with its own country by a neutral road, but it is an island of territory all the same, and the reason that it was so left isolated is very typical of the old regime, with its solemn legal pedantry, which we in England alone preserve in all Western Europe. For the treaty which marked the limits here ceded to the French "the valley and all its villages." The Spaniards pleaded that Llivia was not a village but a town, and their plea was admitted.

I began by saying that this wide basin of land, with its strong people and its isolated traditions, though it was so little known to-day, would soon be too well known. So it will be, and the reason is this, that the very low pass at one end of it will soon be crossed by a railway. It is the only low pass in the Pyrenees, and it is so gradual and even (upon the Spanish side) that the railway will everywhere be above ground. Within perhaps five years it will be for the Pyrenees what the Brenner is for the Alps, and when that is done any one who has read this may go and see for himself whether it is not true that from that plain at evening the frontier ridge of Andorra seems to be the highest thing in the world.

CARCASSONNE

Carcassonne differs from other monumental towns in this: that it preserves exactly the aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment, and from that moment has "set," and has suffered no further change. You see and touch, as you walk along its ramparts, all the generations from that crisis in the fifth century when the public power was finally despaired of--and after which each group of the Western Empire began to see to its own preservation--down to that last achievement of the thirteenth, when medieval civilisation had reached its full flower and was ready for the decline that followed the death of St. Louis and the extinction of the German phantasy of empire.

No other town can present so vivid and clean-cut a fossil of the seven hundred years into which poured and melted all the dissolution of antiquity, and out of which was formed or chrystallised the highly specialised diversity of our modern Europe.

In the fascination of extreme age many English sites are richer; Winchester and Canterbury may be quoted from among a hundred. In the superimposition of age upon age of human history, Arles and Rome are far more surprising. In historic continuity most European towns surpass it, from Paris, whose public justice, worship, and market have kept to the same site for quite sixteen centuries, to London, of which the city at least preserves upon three sides the Roman limit. But no town can of its nature give as does Carcassonne this overwhelming impression of survival or resurrection.

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The attitude and position of Carcassonne enforce its character. Up above the river, but a little set back from the valley, right against the dawn as you come to it from Toulouse through the morning, stands a long, steep, and isolated rock, the whole summit of which from the sharp cliff on the north to that other on the south is doubled in height by what seems one vast wall--and more than twenty towers. Indeed, it is at such a time, in early morning, and best in winter when the frost defines and chisels every outline, that Carcassonne should be drawn. You then see it in a band of dark blue-grey, all even in texture, serrated and battlemented and towered, with the metallic shining of the dawn behind it.

So to have seen it makes it very difficult to write of it or even to paint; what one wishes to do is rather to work it out in enamel upon a surface of bronze. This rock, wholly covered with the works of the city, stands looking at the Pyrenees and holding the only level valley between the Mediterranean and the Garonne, and even if one had read nothing concerning it one would understand why it has filled all the legends of the return of armies from Spain, why Victor Hugo could not rest from the memory of it, and why it is so strongly woven in with the story of Charlemagne.

There is another and better reason for the quality of Carcassonne, and that is the act, to which I can recall no perfect parallel in Christian history, by which St. Louis turned what had been a living town into a mere stronghold. Every inhabitant of Carcassonne was transferred, not to suburbs, but right beyond the river, a mile and more away, to the site of that delightful town which is the Carcassonne of maps and railways, the place where the seventeenth century meets you in graceful ornaments, and where is, to my certain knowledge, the best inn south of parallel 45. St. Louis turned the rock into a mere stronghold, strengthened it, built new towers, and curtained them into that unsurpassable masonry of the central Middle Ages which you may yet admire in Aigues-Mortes and in Carnarvon.

This political act, the removal of a whole city, may have been accomplished in many other places; it is certainly recorded of many: but, for the moment at least, I can remember none except Carcassonne in which its consequences have remained. To this many causes have contributed, but chiefly this, that the new town was transferred to the open plain from the trammels of a narrow plateau, just at the moment when all the towns of Western Europe were growing and breaking their bonds; just after the principal cities of north-western Europe had got their charters, and when Paris (the typical municipality of that age as of our own) was trebling its area and its population.

The transference of the population once accomplished, the rock and towers of Carcassonne ceased to change and to grow. Humanity was gone. The fortress was still of great value in war; the Black Prince attempted its destruction, and it is only within living memory that it ceased to be set down on maps (and in Government offices!) as a fortified place: but the necessity for immediate defence, and the labour which would have remodelled it, had disappeared. There had disappeared also that eager and destructive activity which accompanies any permanent gathering of French families. The new town on the plain changed perpetually, and is changing still. It has lost almost everything of the Middle Ages; it carries, by a sort of momentum, a flavour of Louis XIV, but the masons are at it as they are everywhere, from the Channel to the Mediterranean; for to pull down and rebuild is the permanent recreation of the French. The rock remains. It is put in order whenever a stone falls out of place--no one of weight has talked nonsense here against restoration, for the sense of the past is too strong--but though it is minutely and continually repaired, Old Carcassonne does not change. There is no other set of walls in Europe of which this is true.

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Walking round the circuit of these walls and watching from their height the long line of the mountains, one is first held by that modern subject, the landscape, or that still more modern fascination of great hills. Next one feels what the Middle Ages designed of mass and weight and height, and wonders by what accident of the mind they so succeeded in suggesting infinity: one remembers Beauvais, which is infinitely high at evening, and the tower of Portrut, which seems bigger than any hill.

But when these commoner emotions are passed, one comes upon a very different thing. A little tower there, jutting out perilously from the wall, shows three courses of a _small red brick_ set in a mortar-like stone. When I saw this kind of building I went close up and touched it with my hand. It was Roman. I knew the signal well. I had seen that brick, and picked it loose from an Arab stable on the edge of the Sahara, and I had seen it jutting through moss on the high moors of Northumberland. I know a man who reverently brought home to Sussex such another, which he had found unbroken far beyond Damascus upon the Syrian sand.

It is easy to speak of the Empire and to say that it established its order from the Tyne to the Euphrates; but when one has travelled alone and on foot up and down the world and seen its vastness and its complexity, and yet everywhere the unity even of bricks in their courses, then one begins to understand the name of Rome.

LYNN

Every man that lands in Lynn feels all through him the antiquity and the call of the town; but especially if he comes, as I came in with another man in springtime, from the miles and miles of emptiness and miles of bending grass and the shouting of the wind. After that morning, in which one had been a little point on an immense plane, with the gale not only above one, as it commonly is, but all around one as it is at sea; and after having steeped one's mind in the peculiar loneliness which haunts a stretch of ill-defined and wasted shore, the narrow, varied, and unordered streets of the port enhance the creations of man and emphasise his presence.

Words so few are necessarily obscure. Let me expand them. I mean that the unexpected turning of the ways in such a port is perpetually revealing something new; that the little spaces frame, as it were, each unexpected sight: thus at the end of a street one will catch a patch of the Fens beyond the river, a great moving sail, a cloud, or the sculptured corner of an excellent house.

The same history also that permitted continual encroachment upon the public thoroughfares and that built up a gradual High Street upon the line of some cow-track leading from the fields to the ferry, the spirit that everywhere permitted the powerful or the cunning to withstand authority--that history (which is the history of all our little English towns) has endowed Lynn with an endless diversity.

It is not only that the separate things in such towns are delightful, nor only that one comes upon them suddenly, but also that these separate things are so many. They have characters as men have. There is nothing of that repetition which must accompany the love of order and the presence of strong laws. The similar insistent forms which go with a strong civilisation, as they give it majesty, so they give it also gloom, and a heavy feeling of finality: these are quite lacking here in England, where the poor have for so long submitted to the domination of the rich, and the rich have dreaded and refused a central government. Everything that goes with the power of individuals has added peculiarity and meaning to all the stones of Lynn. Moreover, a quality whose absence all men now deplore was once higher in England than anywhere else, save, perhaps, in the northern Italian hills. I mean ownership, and what comes from ownership--the love of home.

You can see the past effect of ownership and individuality in Lynn as clearly as you can catch affection or menace in a human voice. The outward expression is most manifest, and to pass in and out along the lanes in front of the old houses inspires in one precisely those emotions which are aroused by a human crowd.

All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are worthy (as though they were living beings) of individual names.

Along the river shore, from the race of the ebb that had so nearly drowned me many years before, I watched the walls that mark the edge of the town against the Ouse, and especially that group towards which the ferry-boat was struggling against the eddy and tumble of the tide.

They were walls of every age, not high, brick of a dozen harmonious tones, with the accidents, corners, and breaches of perhaps seven hundred years. Beyond, to the left, down the river, stood the masts in the new docks that were built to preserve the trade of this difficult port. Up-river, great new works of I know not what kind stood like a bastion against the plain; and in between ran these oldest bits of Lynn, somnolescent and refreshing--permanent.

The lanes up from the Ouse when I landed I found to be of a slow and natural growth, with that slight bend to them that comes, I believe, from the drying of fishing-nets. For it is said that courts of this kind grew up in our sea-towns all round our eastern and the southern coast in such a manner. It happened thus.

The town would begin upon the highest of the bank, for it was flatter for building, drier and easier to defend than that part next to the water. Down from the town to the shore the fishermen would lay out their nets to dry. How nets look when they are so laid, their narrowness and the curve they take, everybody knows. Then on the spaces between the nets shanties would be built, or old boats turned upside down for shelter, so that the curing of fish and the boiling of tar and the serving and parcelling of ropes could be done under cover. Then as the number of people grew, the squatters' land got value, and houses were raised (you will find many small freeholds in such rows to this day), but the lines of the net remained in the alley-ways between the houses.

All this I was once told by an old man who helped me to take my boat down Breydon. He wore trousers of a brick red, and the stuff of them as thick as boards, and had on also a very thick jersey and a cap of fur. He was shaved upon his lips and chin, but all round the rest of his face was a beard. He smoked a tiny pipe, quite black, and upon matters within his own experience he was a great liar; but upon matters of tradition I was willing to believe him.

Within the town, when I had gained it from that lane which has been the ferry-lane, I suppose, since the ferry began, age and distinction were everywhere.

Where else, thought I, in England could you say that nine years would make no change? Whether, indeed, the Globe had that same wine of the nineties I could not tell, for the hour was not congenial to wine; but if it has some store of its Burgundy left from those days it must be better still by now, for Burgundy wine takes nine years to mature, for nine years remains in the plenitude of its powers, and for nine years more declines into an honourable age; and this is also true of claret, but in claret it goes by sevens.

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The open square of the town, which one looks at from the Globe, gives one a mingled pleasure of reminiscence and discovery. It breaks on one abruptly. It is as wide as the pasture field, and all the houses are ample and largely founded. Indeed, throughout this country, elbow-room--the sense that there is space enough and to spare in such flats and under an open sky--has filled the minds of builders. You may see it in all the inland towns of the Fens; and one found it again here upon the further bank, upon the edge of the Fens; for though Lynn is just off the Fens, yet it looks upon their horizon and their sky, and belongs to them in spirit.

In this large and comfortable square a very steadfast and most considerable English bank is to be discovered. It is of honest brown brick! its architecture is of the plainest; its appearance is such that its credit could never fail, and that the house alone by its presence could conduct a dignified business for ever. The rooms in it are so many and so great that the owners of such a bank (having become princes by its success) could inhabit them with a majesty worthy of their new title. But who lives above his shop since Richardson died? And did old Richardson? Lord knows!... Anyhow, the bank is glorious, and it is but one of the fifty houses that I saw in Lynn.

Thus, in the same street as the Globe, was a façade of stone. If it was Georgian, it was very early Georgian, for it was relieved with ornaments of a delicate and accurate sort, and the proportions were exactly satisfying to the eye that looked on it. The stone also was of that kind (Portland stone, I think) which goes black and white with age, and which is better suited than any other to the English climate.